Segment-wise optimal trajectory execution control for four-wheeled omnidirectional mobile robots

We introduce a novel technique for path execution control on a four-wheeled omnidirectional mobile robot which provides a segment-wise near-optimal solution based on LQR. The path is specified by a sequence of target regions that the mobile robot will have to visit in order. Unlike other similar solutions that can be found in the literature, our proposed technique is flexible enough to adjust the optimality index for different strategies such as low power consumption, high speed, high accuracy, and so on. We also show how the dynamic model for this kind of robot can be linearized by a change of variables on the control vector. The application that motivated this work is the RoboCup SmallSize League. However, the ideas presented in this paper can be easily extended to other similar applications. The proposed solution is tested against a benchmark simulation experiment and visualized inside an OpenGL virtual environment.